Monday, 30 May 2016

Wigan Central - Wigan CAMRA's Pub of the Year

Wigan Central -
click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Last Saturday, I joined the Southport and West Lancs CAMRA pub crawl of Wigan. We were shown around by Ken and Carol Worthington of Wigan CAMRA. There are some really good pubs there, and we ended up in Wigan Central where we were made welcome by Jo Whalley and her enthusiastic and helpful team. I've written this for the CAMRA page in the Southport Visiter:

Just yards from both of Wigan's railway stations is Wigan Central, situated in railway arches. This bar aims to provide good beers and ciders “from across the region and beyond”. Named after a long-closed railway station, it is decorated in British Railways livery and along one wall there are train seats with overhead luggage racks. Electronic screens show the train arrivals and departures in the nearby stations. Another similar screen shows which beers are likely to depart soon as the casks run out, and what their replacement new arrivals will be.

The Beer Library

Seven real ales and four craft ciders are always available. When we visited, the beers were: Brass Castle Brewery Loco Stock Bitter, Deep Vale American Pale Ale, Prospect Nutty Slack, Prospect Totem, Seven Brothers Stout Porter, Torrside Brewing Katakana and Vocation Brewery Bread & Butter, and while we were there, a couple of these ran out and were replaced by different beers. The Beer Library gives drinkers a choice of more than 120 bottled beers. All of our party were very happy with the choice and quality of our drinks, as you'd expect in CAMRA Wigan Branch's Pub of the Year for 2016.

The new second room

They have just taken over a second arch, and this opened last weekend. This too is in a railway style, but also has a stage for the live music they put in every Sunday from 2.30pm. Other regular events are a quiz every Monday and a beer club on the last Tuesday of each month. Children and dogs are welcome, and they offer free WiFi.